The merger of OxygenOS and ColorOS, as part of OnePlus becoming essentially a subbrand of Oppo, has been coming for some time, and the merged OS should begin arriving for all supported smartphones with the upcoming Android 12 release. If you’re currently enrolled in the OnePlus Developer Preview program on your 9 or 9 Pro, you can get an early look with a new release now arriving for your phone.
While the initial Android 12 builds seemed to be much closer to AOSP than OxygenOS, the new Android 12 for both phones now has a skin applied on top and looks much closer to what might actually be released by OnePlus once it’s stable, as XDA shares. And sure enough, while it keeps some OxygenOS traits and UI elements, the operating system all around seems notably closer to ColorOS than the previous OxygenOS 11 software.
This is in line with OnePlus and Oppo’s plans to merge their respective operating systems into “unified and upgraded” software with the best traits of both. As of the time of writing, it still has a bit of an identity crisis — it’s called OxygenOS internally, but notably has the ColorOS 12 logo on its “about” page, and we’re not entirely sure whether it will be branded as OxygenOS 12, ColorOS 12, or if it will get a new name once released.
The newest build of Android 12 running on a OnePlus 9 Pro. Image credits: XDA
The UI itself draws design elements from both ColorOS and OxygenOS. However, it’s still in clear need of some polishing, and there are some notable glitches. All of these issues are expected to get resolved once the operating system is finally released.
There are also some notable omissions from this firmware. Particularly, scrolling screenshots are absent, and the camera doesn’t support Xpan nor contain Hasselblad elements (we’ve also got some stability issues). Then again, you’re not meant to run this unless you’re a developer or don’t mind dealing with a lot of bugs. If you want to try out Android 12 on your OnePlus 9 earlier than everyone else (and without having a very bad time), it’s probably a good idea to wait until beta updates actually start rolling out after the stable release of Android 12.
The full update changelog goes as follows:
- System
- Optimized the auto-brightness algorithm to adapt screen brightness to more scenes for a comfortable screen reading experience
- Optimized the mistouch prevention algorithm for curved screens to reduce accidental touches
- New design
- Added widgets that show key information of apps and provide instant access to functions
- Optimized the page layout and the presentation of text and color to make key information stand out
- Convenience & efficiency
- Added swiftly switch floated windows, make operation more convenient
- Games
- Optimized the frame rate performance under heavy-used scenes
- Camera
- Added the feature that supported customize the display order of camera mode
- Optimized the zoom experience, make it zoom more smoothly
- Performance
- Added the form of chart to display battery usage
- Newly supported pre-loading the apps that frequently used, to switch them on quickly
- Improved the response speed of turning on or off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Airplane mode, and NFC
You can check out download links and install instructions on the official OnePlus forum post if you’re actually crazy motivated enough to try this on your phone.
